Paradise Tales (41 page)

Sith did not know what to do. She could not move. Despair humbled her, made her hang her head.

I’ve lost him.

The sunlight seemed to settle next to her, washing up from its reflection on the wake of some passing boat.

No, you haven’t.

The river water smelled of kindly concern. The sounds of traffic throbbed with forbearance.

Not yet.

There is no forgiveness in Cambodia. But there are continual miracles of compassion and acceptance.

Sith appreciated for just a moment the miracles. The motoboy buying her soup. She decided to trust herself to the miracles.

Sith talked to the sunlight without making a sound. Grandfather Vireakboth. Thank you. You have told me all I need to know.

Sith stood up and from nowhere, the motoboy was there. He drove her to the Hello Phone shop.

Dara would not look at her. He bustled back and forth behind the counter, though there was nothing for him to do. Sith talked to him like a customer. “I want to buy a mobile phone,” she said, but he would not answer. “There is someone I need to talk to.”

Another customer came in. She was a beautiful daughter, too, and he served her, making a great show of being polite. He complimented her on her appearance. “Really, you look cool.” The girl looked pleased. Dara’s eyes darted in Sith’s direction.

Sith waited in the chair. This was home for her now. Dara ignored her. She picked up her phone and dialed his number. He put it to his ear and said, “Go home.”

“You are my home,” she said.

His thumb jabbed the C button.

She waited. Shadows lengthened.

“We’re closing,” he said, standing by the door without looking at her.

Shamefaced, Sith ducked away from him, through the door.

Outside Soriya, the motoboy played dice with his fellows. He stood up. “They say I am very lucky to have Pol Pot’s daughter as a client.”

There was no discretion in Cambodia, either. Everyone will know now, Sith realized.

At home, the piles of printed paper still waited for her. Sith ate the old, cold food. It tasted flat, all its savor sucked away. The phones began to ring. She fell asleep with the receiver propped against her ear.

The next day, Sith went back to Soriya with a box of the printed papers.

She dropped the box onto the blue plastic counter of Hello Phones.

“Because I am Pol Pot’s daughter,” she told Dara, holding out a sheaf of pictures toward him, “all the unmourned victims of my father are printing their pictures on my printer. Here. Look. These are the pictures of people who lost so many loved ones there is no one to remember them.”

She found her cheeks were shaking and that she could not hold the sheaf of paper. It tumbled from her hands, but she stood back, arms folded.

Dara, quiet and solemn, knelt and picked up the papers. He looked at some of the faces. Sith pushed a softly crumpled green card at him. Her family ID card.

He read it. Carefully, with the greatest respect, he put the photographs on the countertop along with the ID card.

“Go home, Sith,” he said, but not unkindly.

“I said,” she had begun to speak with vehemence but could not continue. “I told you. My home is where you are.”

“I believe you,” he said, looking at his feet.

“Then… .” Sith had no words.

“It can never be, Sith,” he said. He gathered up the sheaf of photocopying paper. “What will you do with these?”

Something made her say, “What will you do with them?”

His face was crossed with puzzlement.

“It’s your country too. What will you do with them? Oh, I know, you’re such a poor boy from a poor family, who could expect anything from you? Well, you have your whole family and many people have no one. And you can buy new shirts and some people only have one.”

Dara held out both hands and laughed. “Sith?”
You, Sith are accusing me of being selfish?

“You own them, too.” Sith pointed to the papers, to the faces. “You think the dead don’t try to talk to you, too?”

Their eyes latched. She told him what he could do. “I think you should make an exhibition. I think Hello Phones should sponsor it. You tell them that. You tell them Pol Pot’s daughter wishes to make amends and has chosen them. Tell them the dead speak to me on their mobile phones.”

She spun on her heel and walked out. She left the photographs with him.

That night she and the motoboy had another feast and burned the last of the unmourned names. There were many thousands.

The next day she went back to Hello Phones.

“I lied about something else,” she told Dara. She took out all the reports from the fortunet-ellers. She told him what Hun Sen’s fortune-teller had told her. “The marriage is particularly well favored.”

“Is that true?” He looked wistful.

“You should not believe anything I say. Not until I have earned your trust. Go consult the fortune-tellers for yourself. This time you pay.”

His face went still, and his eyes focused somewhere far beneath the floor. Then he looked up, directly into her eyes. “I will do that.”

For the first time in her life Sith wanted to laugh for something other than fear. She wanted to laugh for joy.

“Can we go to lunch at Lucky7?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

All the telephones in the shop, all of them, hundreds all at once began to sing.

A waterfall of trills and warbles and buzzes, snatches of old songs or latest chart hits. Dara stood dumbfounded. Finally he picked one up and held it to his ear.

“It’s for you,” he said and held out the phone for her.

There was no name or number on the screen.

Congratulations, dear daughter
, said a warm kind voice.

“Who is this?” Sith asked. The options were severely limited.

Your new father
, said Kol Vireakboth. The sound of wind.
I adopt you
.

A thousand thousand voices said at once,
We adopt you
.

In Cambodia, you share your house with ghosts in the way you share it with dust. You hear the dead shuffling alongside your own footsteps. You can sweep, but the sound does not go away.

On the Tra Bek end of Monivong there is a house whose owner has given it over to ghosts. You can try to close the front door. But the next day you will find it hanging open. Indeed you can try, as the neighbors did, to nail the door shut. It opens again.

By day, there is always a queue of five or six people wanting to go in, or hanging back, out of fear. Outside are offerings of lotus or coconuts with embedded joss sticks.

The walls and floors and ceilings are covered with photographs. The salon, the kitchen, the stairs, the office, the empty bedrooms, are covered with photographs of Chinese-Khmers at weddings, Khmer civil servants on picnics, Chams outside their mosques, Vietnamese holding up prize catches of fish, little boys going to school in shorts, cyclopousse drivers in front of their odd, old-fashioned pedaled vehicles, wives in stalls stirring soup. All of them are happy and joyful, and the background is Phnom Penh when it was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

All the photographs have names written on them in old-fashioned handwriting.

On the table is a printout of thousands of names on slips of paper. Next to the table are matches and basins of ash and water. The implication is plain. Burn the names and transfer merit to the unmourned dead.

Next to that is a small printed sign that says in English HELLO.

Every Pchum Ben, those names are delivered to temples throughout the city. Gold foil is pressed onto each slip of paper, and attached to it is a parcel of sticky rice. At 8 a.m. food is delivered for the monks, steaming rice and fish, along with bolts of new cloth. At 10 a.m. more food is delivered, for the disabled and the poor.

And most mornings a beautiful daughter of Cambodia is seen walking beside the confluence of the Tonlé Sap and Mekong rivers. Like Cambodia, she plainly loves all things modern. She dresses in the latest fashion. Cambodian R&B whispers in her ear. She pauses in front of each new waterfront construction whether built by improvised scaffolding or erected with cranes. She buys noodles from the grumpy vendors with their tiny stoves. She carries a book or sits on the low marble wall to write letters and look at the boats, the monsoon clouds, and the dop-dops. She talks to the reflected sunlight on the river and calls it Father.

I feel so sad, I pick her up and hold her, and suddenly she buries her head in my shoulder. She falls asleep on me as I swing in a hammock and quietly explain myself to her mother. I am not married, I tell Agnete. I run the local casino.

Real men are not hard, just unafraid. If you are a man you say what is true, and if someone acts like a monkey, then maybe you punish them. To be a crook, you have to be straight. I sold guns for my boss and bought policemen, so he trusted me, so I ran security for him for years. He was one of the first to Go, and he sold his shares in the casino to me. Now it’s me who sits around the black lacquered table with the generals and Thai partners. I have a Lexus and a good income. I have ascended and become a man in every way but one. Now I need a family.

Across from Sihanoukville, all about the bay are tiny islands. On those islands, safe from thieves, glow the roofs where the Big Men live in Soriya-chic amid minarets, windmills, and solar panels. Between the islands hang white suspension footbridges. Distant people on bicycles move across them.

Somehow it’s now after the wedding. The children are now mine. We loll shaded in palm-leaf panel huts. Two of the boys play on a heap of old rubber inner tubes. Tharum with his goofy smile and sticky-out ears is long legged enough to run among them, plonking his feet down into the donut holes. Not to be outdone, his brother Sampul clambers over the things. Rith, the oldest, looks cool in a hammock, away with his earphones, pretending not to know us.

Gerda tugs at my hand until I let her go. Freed from the world of language and adults, she climbs up and over the swollen black tubes, sliding down sideways. She looks intent and does not laugh.

Her mother in a straw hat and sunglasses makes a thin, watery sunset smile.

Gerda and I go wading. All those islands shelter the bay, so the waves roll on to the shore child-sized, as warm and gentle as caresses. Gerda holds onto my hand and looks down at them, scowling in silence.

Alongside the beach is a grounded airliner, its wings cut away and neatly laid beside it. I take the kids there, and the boys run around inside it, screaming. Outside, Gerda and I look at the aircraft’s spirit house. Someone witty has given the shrine tiny white wings.

The surrounding hills still have their forests; cumulonimbus clouds towering over them like clenched fists.

In the evening, thunder comes.

I look out from our high window and see flashes of light in the darkness. We live in one whole floor of my casino hotel. Each of the boys has his own suite. The end rooms have balconies, three of them, that run all across the front of the building with room enough for sofas and dining tables. We hang tubes full of pink sugar water for hummingbirds. In the mornings, the potted plants buzz with bees, and balls of seed lure the sarika bird that comes to sing its sweetest song.

In these last days, the gambling action is frenetic: Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Malays, they play baccarat mostly, but some prefer the onearmed bandits.

At the tables of my casino, elegant young women, handsome young men, and a couple of other genders besides, sit upright ready to deal, looking as alert and frightened as rabbits, especially if their table is empty. They are paid a percentage of the take. Some of them sleep with customers, too, but they’re good kids; they always send the money home. Do good, get good, we in Cambodia used to say. Now we say,
twee akrow meen lay
: Do bad, have money.